


heart of clay

by trell (qunlat)



Category: One Piece
Genre: Dissociation, Dressrosa Arc, Gen, Lowercase, Post-Dressrosa, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-01
Updated: 2015-10-01
Packaged: 2018-04-24 05:57:28
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,734
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4907971
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/qunlat/pseuds/trell
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>there is blood under his fingernails and all of it is his; he doesn't clean it out, just looks at the dark lines while the water runs, thinks about the scrape of his nails over stone while he writhed at joker's feet, tearing the skin from his fingers, unfeeling in the face of other agony.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	heart of clay

it’s strawhat that points it out, tactless as ever, “torao, you _smell,_ ” makes him look down for the first time at the ragged mess of his clothes; prompts him to find bartolomeo and ask woodenly for supplies to borrow (and not return, they both well know) and directions to the shipboard shower, the reasons for his request too self-evident to need explanation. 

bartolomeo sends him off almost instantly with both, grimace of disgust thinly-veiled, selects the oldest and least peacock-like of his own wardrobe and points law to the lower deck. the shower is windowless, pale tiles covering the walls and floor, running water in the bath and an empty basin sitting off to the side.

ridding himself of the marks of battle is slow.

peeling out of his coat comes first. it’s heavy—heavier than the fabric alone would be, especially with pieces missing—weighed down, he realizes, by the quantity of his blood that’s gone in it, soaked through. he drops it into the trash without looking, aware at last of how it reeks, of the way it had stuck to his skin, clung to his shoulders and back, a bloodied catalog of injury.

there is blood under his fingernails and all of it is his. he doesn't clean it out, just looks at the dark lines while the water runs, thinks about the scrape of his nails over stone while he writhed at joker's feet, tearing the skin from his fingers, unfeeling in the face of other agony.

the basin fills—overflows, he turns the faucet just as water starts to slop over the edge—and slowly, slowly, he starts. dunks his hands into the water, picks up the soap, closes his eyes.

he begins with his hair, works his fingers into the tangle and scrubs, leans forward to wash the grit away. the water runs rust-brown when he opens his eyes, and that's blood, too, all his own, all his loss. he scrubs until the lacerations on his scalp sting, until he can't feel the clotted sticky filth of it on his hands, until the water in the basin turns into murk.

leaning forward hurts, makes the healing wounds in his gut throb with the tension, but he doesn't stop; not now that he's started, not when he'll never finish at all if he does.

next he turns to his arms, his shoulders, his back. unwraps old bandages—somehow he'd had the presence of mind to disinfect the wounds, back on dressrosa, doctor's habit—drops them into the trash on top of the coat. they smell of blood, too, and antiseptic and gauze, part of the miasma that's been settled around him for days.

he washes, scrubs, disinfects again with the supplies from the onboard infirmary. the water in the basin grows darker, indeterminate scum floating on the surface; his injuries burn. it's a satisfying pain, assurance of function through hurt, the first thing he's felt fully in days, immediate and real.

he shucks his jeans next, washes scrapes on his calves and his knees, tries futilely to scrub the bloodstains out of the fabric. rewraps his bandages, helping himself with his teeth when he hasn't enough hands, again when—he doesn't pause, doesn’t let himself think, just switches tack—a sharp pain in his right arm makes his fingers release, leaves the hand trembling.

and when he's done, clean for the first time in weeks, what's left of his clothes hung to dry—he stands in the middle of the bathroom and feels lost all over again, ritual completed, no next step.

it takes him a long time to pull on the clothes donated by bartolomeo. after, he stares at his reflection in the full-length mirror, struck into awareness by the sight.

he looks—awful. unrecognizable; what looks back at him from the mirror looks nothing at all like what he remembers, looks—

there is a yellowing bruise spreading down from his cheekbone, the eye above it blackened, plasters covering his nose and his jaw, an uncovered gash stark on his forehead. his damaged arm hangs crookedly at his side, his shoulders hunched, all of him pulled downward and in, curled towards his center. bartolomeo's clothes hang too large and too loose on his form, make his lately-thin wrists look wretchedly skeletal, his height serving only to spread him thin.

he looks, fundamentally, hollow. emptied out, drained of life and will, confronting himself in the mirror and finding a caricature scrawled by failure and loss where there should have been him. a thing without a soul, upright still only because it hadn't thought to fall.

that he was someone else mere days ago—that he had anger and defiance, a spine straight with assurance, tightly-coiled violence ready in his limbs—that can’t be reality. a story once heard in passing serving mistakenly in place of truth, and what evidence could he turn to for proof, standing there with no sign of these things left?

he finds himself sitting on the floor with his knees folded under him and can’t remember how he got there, can’t come up with a reason to get up again. the stranger in the glass is like a collapsed marionette, he thinks distantly; a broken toy someone ought to come and collect, or one discarded on purpose, too damaged now to keep.

how long he stays there, unmoving until a knock at the door makes him jump, he doesn’t try to guess. doesn’t think about anything, and that’s better, maybe he’s figured it out after all, this was what he ought to have done all along, severed everything, let everything pass like reflections over still water, stayed motionless until he stopped breathing—

the door bangs open, ricochets off the wall. reflexive, he’s only half on his feet before strawhat (all five feet of him, brimming with energy, too loud and too bright between the room’s colorless walls) comes bouncing inside, shockingly vivid, shocking in full.

law catches no more than one word in three until strawhat starts repeating himself. “torao, it’s been hours, let’s go, there’s dinner, it’s not as good as sanji’s but there’s lots, come outside, you look much better and it doesn’t smell anymore, you don’t have to eat it but you should go,” and he’s pulling law along already, indisputable as waves.

dizzied, he doesn’t find his tongue until he’s already half a dozen steps out the door, stumbling after strawhat through the corridor towards the sunlight pouring in through the hatch. “wait,” he says, “wait—”

strawhat stops so abruptly that he runs into his back.

and law suddenly doesn’t know what to say. doesn’t even know why he asked him to stop now that he has, stares down at him and draws up—nothing.

“wait,” he says again, helplessly, as though that’ll help him figure it out.

as though that alone might give him time to know what to say or do now that he’s failed so absolutely, annihilated himself for nothing, worse than nothing; to make sense of how his hands belong to someone else and how he’s lagging seconds and steps (days, leagues of sea) behind himself, to find a way back to the surface from where seawater is filling his lungs and the weight of it keeps pressing him deeper—

but luffy is still waiting.

irresistible force stopped without an immovable object, halted with only a word, and how a power like that came to be _his_ —law gasps out, “never mind,” and, “lead the way,” blinks hard.

there’s a moment where strawhat stares back at him, searching, eyes wide. unprompted, he tells law, “it’s gonna be okay,” and law wonders suddenly if strawhat came looking for him out of fear, thinking of what he’d done that night when they’d first departed dressrosa; thought he might try again, try differently.

the guilt that’s been pushing formlessly at his insides rises violently, tightens his throat, makes it difficult to swallow.

and he thinks, luffy’s hand on his like a brand, _if only you’d let him kill me; if only you’d been a little more late; if only things had gone the way they should have_. it would all be so much easier, then, for him and strawhat both, none of this hideous cowardly thing curled inside his breast, no worries for strawhat; and dead men don’t have to live with their failures, don’t have to swallow consequences down bitter. 

“i wasn’t,” falls out of his mouth, “if that’s what you think, i wasn’t.” but he would and he had, and strawhat is right to suspect him, distrust him, he’s figured that out at last. 

“i know,” says strawhat, utterly guileless, and tightens his grip on law’s hand, pulls him gently up the steps towards the hatch. for once law’s the one that has to look up at him, squinting against the harsher light that outlines him from behind, and he’s met with a smile, given freely as always. “come on!”

his heart beats heavy in his chest as they walk up the steps, and he thinks— _wanting,_ that’s something he never learned how to do. telling strawhat what he desires is an impossibility when he doesn’t know how to figure it out for himself, and it’s daunting, it’s daunting, he’s lived for so long as a hand of vengeance (as a ghost; corazón’s will where his own would have been if he hadn’t lost it a lifetime ago, hadn’t left it behind buried in the white city’s ashes—)

—only it wasn’t even corazón’s will after all, and where does that leave him, all that he did done for no one, thirteen years erased for a lie he invented, failing cora even in this most simple of things, _live, law_ —

—but there is something in his heart, deeper still than the blood it sends running through his veins, hiding under the fear and the ruins of his shattered convictions. something that stirs when strawhat beams at him like he’s happy he’s there, when he’s being pulled along too fast to stop to worry, when he finds himself stunningly unalone. 

and he thinks, hardly daring: like it might slip through his fingers if he risks looking right at it: _i want to be with him._

strawhat reaches down to pull him up through the hatch, into the light.

law grips strawhat’s calloused hand, follows him out; follows, and holds on.


End file.
